2009 | Charlotte Becket - HILARY CRISP GALLERY

2009 | Charlotte Becket

26 August – 3 October 2009

Untitled (white blob), 2005
Vinyl, wood, aluminum and motor
1.5 x 2 x 2 meters

CRISP presents the UK solo debut of New York-based artist, CHARLOTTE BECKET.

Exploring the territory between a Sisyphean futility and jubilant optimism, the exhibition uses references to pop psychology and the use of commonplace materials. Kinetic sculptures move slowly – sometimes imperceptibly – performing gestures born from the banality of the human condition. Their looping, rhythmic motion transforms the sculptures from motorized machines to figural abstractions or landscapes.

The series, Inkblot (2009), includes wall mounted geometric forms with black-mirrored surfaces.

The top of each mass has been sheared, producing a shelf-like form that strictly delineates between above and below. Underneath the plateau, crystalline abstractions accumulate to create an imposing Rorschach image. The rigid symmetrical landscape is punctuated with bulging rifts that slowly swell, either in a moment of expansion or deflation. As the forms slowly shift and redirect light they become hallucinogenic and unstable. They are sometimes landscapes, smoke, ships, heavy metal concert stages or balloons.

“The reflections produced by black mirrors have a strange way of creating a space that seems simultaneously flat and illusionistic. Because of their properties, black mirrors have been used historically to experiment with optics. English picturesque landscape painters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries used a device known as the Claude Lorrain Mirror, named after the French landscape painter whose work was considered to be the picturesque ideal, a slightly convex mirror made of black glass. The painter would turn their back on the scene being observed and paint only from the refelcted image… I like this idea that you need a tool to see the world as it should be seen, or the ‘real truth’…. looking into a dark mirror allows the physical eyes to relax.”

Other wall-mounted work include a sculpture entirely composed of black plastic strapping which creates a calligraphic line recalling the abstract paintings of Brice Marden and Cy Twombly. The piece is suspended between two facing walls, with a greater density near the walls and tapering out towards the middle of the room where the sides meet in a tenuous connection. The two sides slowly pull themselves apart and drift back together. This unfurled Gordian knot strains under the task of fusion and separation in an ambivalent tug of war.

Still works take the form of bloated bodies that creak and strain, endlessly moaning and muttering to themselves in an unresolved internal dialogue. These works couple the complexity of human behavior with the ambivalence of a reduced gesture.

CHARLOTTE BECKET received an MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2006 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include Peter Fingesten Gallery, Pace University, New York (2009), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2006) and Taxter & Spengemann, New York (2006/2005/2004). Recent group exhibitions include Passerby Gallery, New York (2008), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2007) and American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2007).

All images courtesy Taxter & Spengemann, New York and CRISP, London/Los Angeles

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